installing spacemacs without disturbing existing emacs

Question

I have been using emacs for a while, and i recently installed zsh and i wanted to give a try with spacemacs. I want to try spacemacs without disturbing existing emacs.

I followed the instruction as mentioned here.

• created a dir ~/spacemacs
• git clone https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs.git ~/spacemacs/.emacs.d
• HOME=~/spacemacs emacs

I did the first two steps. But im not sure to do the last step HOME=~/spacemacs emacs, because i want things to be as follows. when i give emacs, my default emacs should open, and when i give semacs i want to open spacemacs.

So far, i have modified my .zshrc file in such a way that, when i give the command emacs it fires up emacs, so i have an alias like such alias emacs='emacs -nw'.

And i want to give semacs(alias for spacemacs) open spacemacs, so that i can open emacs any time i wanted to, if im not comfortable with spacemacs. Now what should be the 3rd step as and what should be my alias look like.

Answer 1

If I understand your question, what you want to do is set up an alias. The third command, HOME=~/spacemacs emacs, will launch emacs using the Spacemacs configuration and layers. So, all you should need to do is put

alias semacs='HOME=~/spacemacs emacs'

in your .zshrc file, and restart the shell.

As a caveat, I am not very familiar with zsh, but am reasonably experienced with bash. I assume simple aliases like this should work the same.

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EDIT: I was unable to personally get the alias working in zsh. However, I was able to do it using a shell function (based on this answer):

semacs() {
  HOME=~/spacemacs emacs $@
}